Meet the garden designer who took up her hobby to overcome grief and now is off to Chelsea

Charlotte Harris recovered from mourning by turning to garden design. Now she’s about to unveil her Chelsea Flower Show debut. By Rob Hastings, with pictures by Micha Theiner

It’s the cascade of white flowers that first catches my eye. Draping down the walls of a mini courtyard at the back of a Notting Hill townhouse, the clematis is out in full bloom. But for the garden’s designer, Charlotte Harris, it’s the tree ferns – and their unfurling, tentacle-like fronds – that are the prize exhibit.

“Aren’t these great?” says Charlotte, who can’t resist taking photos of the Dicksonia antarctica ferns on her phone. It was last October, at the end of an unusually long 18-month design and construction project in west London, that she and her team planted the flowers, ferns and lush foliage here.

Now this small but most perfectly formed of city gardens is about to enjoy its first summer, showing off everything that Charlotte desires in an outdoor space.

“I really love making gardens that have strong textures,” she says. “The foliage is as important as the flowers, particularly when you look at smaller gardens.”

Charlotte explains her plant choices in the courtyard:

Designing to a brief

The brief from the clients who hired Charlotte to transform the courtyard here was to create a “cool, subdued, calm” area, and that’s something the designer could probably benefit from herself right now. The day after we meet, she will embark on putting together her debut show garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Designing for high-end clients with equally high standards has its own pressures, but preparing for Chelsea “has been quite a terrifying experience”, she admits with a smile. After all, it is “the greatest flower show on earth”.

“Chelsea is about trying things you can’t necessarily try in other people’s gardens,” she says. “It’s about taking a creative risk and stretching yourself.”

However, it sounds as if Charlotte’s research for her project should pay off. Sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada, her garden will be a celebration of the firm’s North American homeland, marking the 150th anniversary of the country’s confederation. It will be based on the landscape of ­Canada’s boreal forest in Ontario, where Charlotte travelled for some “spectacular and magical” inspiration.

“I got dropped into the wilderness by a three-seater floatplane, which was really cool,” she says. “I spent two weeks there. Flying quite low, you see streams and rivulets of water, forests of green and blue below you. It’s incredibly beautiful. I stayed in a log cabin and had a guide from the local indigenous community who took us around on a boat, a canoe and on foot.”

The resulting work will be a beautiful mixture of woodland and water. The three structural elements are three jack pines, Pinus banksiana, “which I don’t think have been to Chelsea before. “They are absolutely archetypical of that boreal landscape. I love them – they’re gnarled and imperfect and so characterful.”

It will also feature glacial granite boulders, sourced in Wales, as well as a terrace made from sliced rock, and a pavilion with a charred larch frame and a copper interior. “I wanted a sense of wildness alongside slightly more formality,” she explains.

The therapeutic effect of gardening

Charlotte’s Chelsea show garden will be the highlight of a career that was borne out of tragedy. The history graduate originally worked for an advertising agency after leaving university, but in her mid-20s her life changed forever. “Within a nine-month period, my father committed suicide, my very beloved grandmother died and my mum also died,” she tells i.

“For five years I worked incredibly hard, and partied very hard, and did all those things you do to try to do to run away from it. Then I got to a moment where I thought: I can’t do this any more.”

When the grief caught up with her, Charlotte’s reaction was to begin clearing the unattractive paved garden of the east London house she had recently bought. “I spent a summer sledgehammering it and breaking it up, and it was very cathartic,” she says. “I found the experience really therapeutic, both in the physicality of it but also how the garden teaches us a lot about patience and having to relinquish control. I had spent a lot of my childhood in the garden with my mother and it was something that I wanted to explore more.”

Charlotte left the advertising world behind and went on to study at the respected Merrist Wood College in Surrey, training to become a professional garden designer in their “400-acre outdoor classroom”. She then worked for Tom Stuart-Smith’s practice before launching her own business by opening her design studio.

Charlotte’s top tips for garden design:

“Keep it simple, particularly with city gardens. We think about putting one or two of everything in there, but actually keeping it very simple gives it a ­calmness and rhythm. Try restraining yourself to eight or 10 things. Simplicity is also best for materials.

“Think about your garden as an opportunity and take time to understand it. Don’t feel you have to rush in and finish it in the first month. Learn how it changes across the seasons and how you’re going to use it.

“If you’re in a city, try to do things that encourage wildlife, because the environmental side is really important. Start a compost pile, don’t cut everything down, encourage birds.

“If you’re redeveloping your whole garden, ideally plant the garden between November and March, and then work on any construction when the weather is warmer so you’re not going to damage the soil by tracking over it with men and machines. The structure of the soil is really important for the health of any plant, and by compacting it you’re taking the air out of it, and killing all the positive stuff that’s happening down there. It’s usually the most important thing for getting it right in the garden.”

Understanding what a client wants

After meeting the clients to get a good sense of what they wanted, Charlotte submitted some technical and 3D sketches along with photos showing examples of plants and other design elements.

“It’s a residence they wanted to feel incredibly calm, with a subdued palette,” she explains. “The front garden is quite shady and cool, so I’ve made a woodland garden. The client loves white, so all the planting is white flowering, and then there’s a very rich textual foliage base as well.”

The courtyard is also very peaceful but with “a very different feel, quite simple with a palette of just eight or nine different plants”. Along with the ferns there are other evergreens including Euphorbia pasteurii, Sarcococca confusa – with fragrant, winter-flowering white flowers – and Melica grass.

The gardens she designed here in this upmarket Notting Hill townhouse – transforming not just the rear courtyard but also the beds either side of the three grand tiers of steps up to the front entrance – illustrate beautifully Charlotte’s own work but also more generally how a designer can create a singular vision that most amateurs would struggle to develop.

What price a place to chill out?

The redevelopment of a large public or commercial space can involve a construction budget that totals hundreds of thousands of pounds. Though smaller gardens need not cost a fortune, designed for budgets that ensure “the balance between maximising their garden’s potential and meeting the brief,” many variants affect the total price: scope, scale, ­materials, immediate impact requirements, plant maturity and access to the site.

The front garden here required many mature plants to look fully developed straight away. Charlotte also ensured they would fit well with extensive changes being made to the house at the same time, which naturally slowed the process down; while it might take only six months from first meeting for some projects to be completed, here it took 18 months.

How to choose and work with a garden designer

“A good garden designer will help you focus on what you want the garden for – that is the crucial thing,” says Charlotte. “Who is going to be using it? Is it a garden for entertaining; a garden for children; do you want to grow vegetables? They’ll also help you frame your ideas around your likes and your dislikes.

“When you’re selecting garden designers, make sure you see portfolios of their work and photographs to make sure that their style is in keeping with what you’re hoping for.

“Finally, ask for references or recommendations from previous clients or architects that they’ve worked with.”

Chelsea, of course, requires gardens to look their best immediately and construction involves a quick turnaround. However, Charlotte has been planning for months, using the Hampshire nursery Hortus Loci to get the plants ready, and testing components such as the terrace and the boulders in advance.

And no matter whether it’s at Chelsea, in a client’s garden or in her own backyard, Charlotte ­enjoys getting her green fingers dirty. “I like setting out my plants myself rather than just issuing a planting plan and asking people to get on with it,” she says. “I like selecting my plants, I like selecting my trees. I’m pretty hands on and that’s important to me.”

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